Fort Bend tells feds it will help Spanish-speaking voters

Fort Bend accepts vote decreeCounty will help speakers of Spanish at voting booth

ALAN BERNSTEIN and ZEN T.C. ZHENG, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published
5:30 am CDT, Saturday, April 11, 2009

Under pressure from the federal government since 2004, Fort Bend County has agreed to greatly expand the use of Spanish in election materials and voter assistance.

The U.S. Justice Department revealed the agreement in federal court here along with its allegations that the county failed to obey several requirements for multilingual access to election information.

The agency, which has monitored elections in Fort Bend and a few other Texas counties since at least 2004, refused to say what prompted its investigation of the elections. Court documents suggested voter complaints may have triggered the probe, noting that the county has agreed to guard against election workers becoming hostile to Spanish-speaking and Hispanic voters.

The population of Fort Bend, which includes the southwestern tip of Houston, was 22 percent Hispanic as of 2004, according to the Justice Department. The total number of county residents since has topped 500,000.

Fort Bend was among several Texas counties that published its ballots in Spanish. Federal officials said more action was needed to follow voting rights law.

“The (law) requires Fort Bend County to provide meaningful and equal electoral access to its Hispanic citizens who have limited English proficiency,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said. “I am pleased that Fort Bend County officials have agreed to measures that will protect these important rights and will put in place important electoral safeguards.”

County Judge Bob Hebert indicated the county was a reluctant participant in the settlement.

“This was a consent degree negotiated under the threat of a lawsuit,” he said.

Technically, the Justice Department did sue the county this week, including the county’s settlement in its filing. Fighting the suit would have cost the county $1 million or more, Hebert said.

“It just requires us to do the things we are trying to do every day,” he said of the agreement. “We do not acknowledge that we violated the law. They complained we have. We agree that we are obligated to follow the Voting Rights Act in its entirety … but everything we agreed to are things that we thought we were doing.”

Ballots in 3 languages

Federal officials tried to get the county to sign in 2006, saying part of its sizable Asian-American population also was underserved at the polls. The county refused, saying the charges were vague. The new settlement makes no mention of Asian Americans.

Separate from the language issue, Fort Bend County also agreed to make sure provisional ballot applications are available to all voters who asked to vote after stating they were properly registered, even though their names were missing from the county rolls.

The Justice Department drastically increased legal action against U.S. counties over voting rights during the Bush administration, reaching agreements with Waller County in 2008 and Ector County in West Texas in 2005.